Kat, a federal bank regulator from Chicago, met her spouse through the SCA. She joined the society over thirty years ago when she was fifteen years old, met her husband-to-be there three years later, and married him when she was twenty-four. “Without our mutual interests in the SCA period of history,” she said, “we never would have met.” The great thing about the SCA, Kat said, is that it values people who have interests that are outside the norm. “I have one friend,” Kat said, “who is passionate about woodworking from the fourteenth century. I have another who is passionate about how they did their laundry back then. Another is into Japanese tea ceremonies. Whatever your thing is, we value you because you are learning and sharing that knowledge with others.”
The SCA also builds belonging by giving people a strong network of friends. At the coronation, I met a member named James from St. Louis, Missouri. James, who said he was “socially inept and awkward” before joining the SCA, struggles with depression. He often feels inadequate and like a failure. It took him nearly twenty years, he said, to complete college, and today he is an adjunct professor at a community college, “which is not where I want to be.” But in the SCA, he is the event organizer, a role that makes him feel capable and appreciated by his peers. The SCA, he said, gave him the confidence that he could not only socialize gracefully with a group of people, but also have something to contribute to them.
Several years ago, during one of his depressive phases, James checked into a psychiatric ward and was placed on suicide watch. When he was released, one of the first things he did was get together with his SCA friends for dinner. One of them said to him, “You know, James, if you ever left this earth, that would make all of us here very unhappy.” It was a simple statement—a small gesture of support. But James carries it with him. When he starts to doubt whether his life is worth living, he brings that memory to the front of his mind, and it brings him comfort, reminding him that he is cared for.
Like all tight-knit communities, the SCA helps its members develop close relationships to a small group of people. But it also creates a network of trust and support among all of its members. Whether they’re best friends or mere acquaintances, members take their relationships to one another seriously and lean on each other in times of need. Several years ago, one of the members of the Middle Kingdom was diagnosed with a serious illness. He had health insurance, but because he was too sick to work, he was having a hard time paying his bills. When the members of his kingdom found out, they decided to raise money for him by holding a silent auction of medieval crafts they had made. They ultimately raised over $10,000. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, SCA members from all over the country raised money and sent food and supplies to their unknown friends in Louisiana. Some members even paid their own way to New Orleans to help the stricken rebuild their homes and their lives.
The duty members feel to serve and support one another doesn’t just spring from the community—it’s also what sustains it. And it’s those bonds, as much as the medieval regalia, that keep people like James coming back. “This,” he said, “is my tribe.” He looked over at the rapier combat happening in the sweaty social hall of the church and smiled.
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While close relationships are critical for living a meaningful life, they are not the only important social bonds we need to cultivate. Psychologists have also discovered the value of small moments of intimacy. “High quality connections,” as one researcher calls them, are positive, short-term interactions between two people, like when a couple holds hands on a walk or when two strangers have an empathetic conversation on a plane. We can sometimes be distracted or aloof when we’re with another person, but during a high quality connection, each person is tuned in to the other and both reciprocate positive regard and care. As a result, both people feel valued. High quality connections play a role, of course, in making our close relationships with friends or romantic partners meaningful—but they also have the potential to unlock meaning in our interactions with acquaintances, colleagues, and strangers.
Jonathan Shapiro, an entrepreneur in New York, has a regular morning routine. Every day on his way to work, he buys a newspaper from the same street vendor, whose newsstand is by a busy subway station on the Upper West Side. Though both Jonathan and the vendor have every incentive to rush through the exchange of goods for money and get on with their days, they always take a moment to have a brief conversation.
Buying a newspaper, a cup of coffee, or groceries can feel businesslike and impersonal. Many of us are so caught up in our own lives, so rushed and preoccupied, that we acknowledge the people we are interacting with only instrumentally—as a means to an end. We fail to see them as individuals. But Jonathan and the vendor—even with hundreds of people streaming by them at the busiest time of the day in one of the largest cities in the world—take a moment to slow down. They break outside of their cocoons and form a brief bond with one another. Each of them lets the other one know that he is heard, seen, and appreciated—that he matters. Each of them helps the other one feel a little less alone in a vast and impersonal city.
One day, when Jonathan went to buy the paper, he realized he had only big bills. The vendor could not make change for Jonathan’s $20 bill, so he smiled widely and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll pay tomorrow.” But Jonathan tensed up and shook his head. He insisted on paying for the paper, so he went into a store and bought something he did not need so he could make change. He handed the vendor a dollar and said, “Here you go, to be sure I don’t forget.”
In that instant, the dynamic of their relationship changed. The vendor reluctantly took Jonathan’s money and drew back in sadness.
“I did the wrong thing,” Jonathan later said. “I didn’t accept his kindness. He wanted to do something meaningful, but I treated it as a transaction.”
The vendor isn’t the only person, of course, who has felt cut down by rejection. Psychologists have shown that social exclusion—even in the context of an interaction with a stranger during a research study—is a threat to meaning. In one experiment, undergraduates were brought into the lab, broken into small groups, and instructed to socialize with one another for fifteen minutes. Then each student was led into a separate room where he was told to nominate two of those people to interact with again. Those nominations were not used. Rather, half of the students were told, by random assignment, that everyone wanted to see them again. The other half were told that not even a single person did. You can imagine how those responses made the students feel. Those who were made to feel rejected and left out—made to believe they did not belong—were significantly more likely to say that life in general was meaningless. Other research shows that rejected participants also rate their own lives as less meaningful.
Perhaps surprisingly, psychologists have also found that social rejection can make both the rejected and the rejecter feel alienated and insignificant. As Jonathan learned on a crowded street corner of the Upper West Side, the smallest moment of rejection can knock the meaning out of a connection as easily as the smallest moment of belonging can build it up. After Jonathan dismissed the vendor’s bid for mutual trust, both of them left each other that morning feeling diminished.
Fortunately, the two men were able to restore their relationship. The next time Jonathan saw the vendor, he brought him a cup of tea. And the next time the vendor offered Jonathan a newspaper, Jonathan thanked him and humbly accepted his gesture of kindness. They continue to share a quick conversation each day.
Jane Dutton, an organizational psychologist at the University of Michigan, coined the phrase “high quality connections” along with her colleague Emily Heaphy. Dutton studies the ways we interact in the workplace, and she has found that our connections there have a significant effect not just on our experience at work, but also in our lives as a whole. Given that work is where many people spend most of their waking hours, that shouldn’t be too surprising. But it means that if we don’t feel a sense of belonging on the job, both our jobs and
our lives will feel less meaningful.
In one study, Dutton and her colleagues interviewed the cleaning and janitorial staff at a large hospital in the Midwest. They chose to focus on cleaners because they are vital to the operation of a hospital but are often ignored and disrespected. Their so-called dirty work is not generally valued by society. People talk about how meaningful it is to be a nurse who cares for the sick or a doctor who saves a person’s life; they rarely talk about how meaningful it is to clean toilets.
Dutton and her colleagues randomly selected twenty-eight cleaners and interviewed them about their job responsibilities, how significant they believed their work to be, and their relationships with other people on the job, including doctors, nurses, patients, and visitors. The researchers were particularly interested in whether the cleaners felt respected and valued by their peers—whether their belonging needs were being met.
The cleaners told some two hundred stories about their time at work. When the researchers analyzed those stories, they discovered the powerful role that belonging plays in how people experience their jobs. Brief interactions, they found, could be deeply hurtful. When cleaners felt devalued by their colleagues, their work felt less meaningful.
The most common way the cleaners felt devalued was by being ignored. Doctors were particularly egregious offenders. One cleaner named Harry said, “The doctors have a tendency to look at us like we’re not even there, like, you know, we’ll be working in the hallways, and you know, no recognition of what you are doing whatsoever.” A cleaner might be sweeping the hallway, but a group of doctors is standing in the way, which means, as Harry said, that “you have to ask them to move, every day, the same doctors every day.” Several other cleaners told a similar story. The doctors, the cleaners felt, had “no regard” for them or what they were doing. It was like they were telling the cleaners that the cleaners do not exist and that their work does not matter. As a cleaner named Sheena told the researchers, “Sometimes you get the impression like, you know, they think they are more important than you are. And I mean their job is very important, but you know, cleaning the hospital is very important, too.”
The cleaners spoke often about how doctors and nurses, whom they would see and work with every day, would walk right past them in the hallway without saying hello. One cleaner said that being ignored made her feel like “an invisible person that sort of floats around on the outside looking in.” Another spoke of how the patients and their visitors disregarded them, too. Visitors, he said, often walked right through an area of floor he was mopping. “I think that this indicates they don’t care about the cleaning people,” he said.
Thankfully, those were not the only types of interactions the cleaners had. A “Good morning” from a patient could be packed with meaning. “They look at you like a person, you know?” said Kevin about patients who would acknowledge him as he cleaned their rooms. Another talked about how meaningful it was when the patients expressed gratitude. “They are not required to say thank you,” he said. It’s his job to clean their rooms, after all. “I guess,” he said, “I feel appreciated by these things.”
Positive experiences with colleagues, too, helped the cleaners feel a sense of belonging. One cleaner named Ben told a story about coming to work with a terrible stomachache. He was trying to sweep the floor, but the pain was so overwhelming that he bent over his broom in distress. A doctor came up to him and asked what was wrong, and Ben told him. The doctor told Ben he might have an ulcer (and, as it turned out, he did). It was kind of the doctor to stop and talk to Ben, but Ben’s story focused on how the doctor treated him after that encounter. Every time the doctor saw Ben in the hospital, he would say, “Hey, Ben, how are you doing? Is everything better?” The doctor showed concern for Ben, and that made Ben feel valued.
Another cleaner named Corey talked about how the nurses he worked with made him feel like part of the team. When they would move patients from bed to bed or room to room, he would help them—and they, in turn, included him not just in professional tasks, but also in social gatherings: “When they have potluck or a dinner, or doughnuts, or rolls or whatever, or coffee, they invite me….It lets me know that they appreciate me and that I’m likable.”
When the hospital cleaners experienced these high quality connections, their relationship to their work changed. They saw themselves as caregivers rather than merely janitors, and they felt more closely tied to the mission of the hospital, which is to heal patients. Small inconsiderate acts, on the other hand, made them reevaluate the significance of their work, their ability to perform their tasks competently, and, even more gravely, their own worth as people.
The beauty of a high quality connection approach is that you don’t have to overhaul the culture at your workplace to create meaning. Anyone, in any position, can change how they feel, and how their coworkers feel, simply by fostering small moments of connection. The results would be transformative. Dutton has found that high quality connections can revitalize employees emotionally and physically, and help organizations function better. They lead employees to feel more energized and engaged at work, make them more resilient when they encounter setbacks or frustration, and help teams work together more cohesively. Feeling like part of the group can make even the most mundane tasks seem valuable and worth doing well. Yes, brief interactions can be demeaning—but they can also be dignifying.
We can’t control whether someone will make a high quality connection with us, but we can all choose to initiate or reciprocate one. We can decide to respond kindly, rather than antagonistically, to an annoying colleague. We can say hello to a stranger on the street rather than avert our eyes. We can choose to value people rather than devalue them. We can invite people to belong.
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Close relationships and high quality connections have an important feature in common: both require us to focus on others. Think of René Spitz and how he tried to comfort baby Jane, or the SCA members who supported their acquaintances in New Orleans, or the doctor in Dutton’s study who checked on Ben. They all put the needs of others before their own and helped them during a difficult period or moment in their lives; they all felt moved by what another person was going through, and they did something to make that person’s life a little bit better. The recipients of their kindness were, in turn, elevated.
Compassion lies at the center of the pillar of belonging. When we open our hearts to others and approach them with love and kindness, we ennoble both those around us and ourselves—and the ripples of our compassionate acts persist, even long after we’re gone. A story from the life of the Buddha offers an instructive parable. After the Buddha had his awakening beneath the Bodhi tree, he devoted his life to traveling through India teaching people of all classes the dharma, the basic principles of Buddhism—that life is full of suffering, which is caused by our endless cravings, and that we can be liberated from suffering by cultivating wisdom, living morally, and disciplining our minds through meditation.
When he was eighty years old, the Buddha was still traversing the countryside in his robes and bare feet, but he no longer had the energy of his younger years. “I am old and worn out,” he said, “like a dilapidated cart held together with thin straps.”
Approaching a tiny village, the Buddha grew frail and weak. When he arrived, a local blacksmith named Cunda, in a gesture of devotion and hospitality, offered him a meal that, the story goes, the Buddha knew was spoiled. The Buddha, however, did not want to hurt Cunda by rejecting the kind and generous offer of food. So he ate the food, even though he knew he would fall ill. “And soon after the Blessed One had eaten the meal provided by Cunda the metalworker,” we learn, “a dire sickness fell upon him, even dysentery, and he suffered sharp and deadly pains.”
When it became clear he was going to die, the Buddha once more exhibited a heroic compassion for Cunda. “It may come to pass,” Buddha told his attendant, “that someone will cause remorse to Cunda the metalworker, saying: ‘It is no gain to you, friend Cunda
, but a loss, that it was from you the Buddha took his last alms meal, and then came to his end.’ ”
The Buddha instructed his attendant to dispel Cunda’s remorse by telling him that he played an indispensable role in the Buddha’s life. Cunda, after all, gave the Buddha his final meal: “There are two offerings of food,” the Buddha explained to his attendant, “which are of equal fruition, of equal outcome, exceeding in grandeur the fruition and result of any other offerings of food. Which two? The one partaken of by the Buddha before becoming fully enlightened in unsurpassed, supreme Enlightenment; and the one partaken of by the Buddha before passing into the state of Nirvana in which no element of clinging remains.” In other words, the meal Cunda had prepared was one of the most important ones the Buddha ever ate.
The Buddha didn’t have to extend his compassion to Cunda in those final moments of his life. He was deathly ill and in a great deal of pain. Instead of worrying about the blacksmith who had inadvertently poisoned him, the Buddha could have devoted his precious time to preparing for death or meditating or contemplating the legacy of Buddhism. But he didn’t. Instead, he turned his attention to Cunda and assured him that the bond the two of them formed was meaningful.
The Buddha’s story contains a lesson for all of us. The search for meaning is not a solitary philosophical quest, as it’s often depicted, and as I thought it was in college—and meaning is not something that we create within ourselves and for ourselves. Rather, meaning largely lies in others. Only through focusing on others do we build the pillar of belonging for both ourselves and for them. If we want to find meaning in our own lives, we have to begin by reaching out.
Ashley Richmond spends the majority of her time at work cleaning poop out of stalls. Her hours are rough, and she rarely gets holidays off. She earns significantly less money than most college graduates her age. And her body often aches at the end of the day. And yet, she says, this is her dream job: “I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
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